How did I get here?

It is one of these days, where there are a number of things all coming together to set a theme that I was not expecting. And I have found it helpful to recognize those days with an article here.

A couple of days back, a colleague asked for advice on how to network on LinkedIn, and after I responded, he went beyond that, basically saying: "I am striving to move up in the world, so how did you get where you are today. The answer to that alone would have busted the limited for a post response.

Today, opening LinkedIn, I also found this HBR Article:"The Myth of the Career Ladder", which goes on to say that the career path is an outcome, not a guideline.

So in answer to the question and reflecting on the truth behind this article, here is a short memoir of my professional life so far.

I wasn't born into the oilfield, not a big surprise, if you consider the tiny size of the industry in my native Germany. But I was born into a family linked to industry. My grandfather had been a plant manager in a variety of metallurgical- and inorganic chemistry plants after getting a PhD in Technical Chemistry in a time when Process Engineering did not exist. My dad, coming from a family of limited means, which had been displaced after World War II, had gone through an apprenticeship with the pen/pencil maker Faber-Castell as what would be roughly translated as an industrial merchant, a common trade combining accounting and hands-on commercial management. He traveled as a salesman in late colonial / early post-colonial Africa and South America. On the way there, he met my mum on the banana freighter carrying them. My mom had finished High School and decided that she wanted to get out and went to spend time with relatives in Peru, learning Spanish and working as an administrator for a variety of companies. The both then joined a German (mostly downstream and non-oilfield) EPC company and were sent to Chile together to help build a copper plant. They pursued a dual career living in Chile, Spain and Mexico until my birth, when they settled down in Germany to give the kids a steady environment. While my mom took time out to look after us, my dad kept working with the company, travelling all over the world.

Why am I writing this? Because it set the starting block for my career. As a kid, I saw the big plants dealing with everything from metal to energy generation and soil decontamination, the adventure of travelling and living overseas, the diversity of friends and colleagues my parents had collected over the years. This went up to the point, where in my high school, which was not next door to the company, there was an identified class of "Lurgi-children", people with similar outlooks, whose parents had known each other from various projects, and who fit a similar culture influenced by the corporate environment. And I wanted some of that too. In addition, I discovered in the reports of my dad's employer the art of project management. Getting complicated and big things done in an organized and efficient fashion (or "loving it when a plan comes together", to go with Col. Hannibal Smith). They had that as a specialty to the point, where they were awarded the project management of Germany's second space shuttle mission, without having any experience in the aerospace arena. Bundled together with a traditional, science-heavy education, I got formed to the point that my graduation yearbook cited me with the intention to get a job on an offshore oil rig.

Coming out of High School, that pushed me in the direction of Process Engineering, which I lacked the required workshop internship for, a SNAFU with my military service had eaten up that time, and landed me in Chemical Engineering, which was the next best thing, replacing workshop with lab work, to be done during semester break times. I am not going to bore you with the details of the curriculum leading to an eventual graduation as what would be called in the English-speaking world a MSc in Chemical Engineering, because that is public knowledge and not very different for anybody going through it. More important were the other things I had a chance to do. In High School, in order to earn the money for a VHS LP capable video recorder, I had taken on a job as vacation replacement for an IT Support Technician in an EPC firm my mom was working for. Those were the days, when IT was an in-house function, and not a per-ticket standardized, outsourced support. There I learnt about computers, networks and how to clean a laser printer, but also (talking early nineties here) early networking, email and html.

In uni, I took these skills and volunteered in the students' union and taking on a paid research- and teaching assistant's job dabbling in Technical Mechanics tutorials and rheology research. These two activities in turn equipped me with skills in institutional politics, hands-on experimentation, offset printing (large reams of preparation material like scripts and old exam questions for my fellow students), rheological experiments and a paid follow-on job in preparing a poster for a project presentation, which in turn taught me basic desktop publishing and presentation skills. I also became a member of Germany's big engineering association (VDI), which gave me the opportunity to participate in to annual conferences and an international engineering trade fair (ACHEMA in Frankfurt, if that means anything to you).

Elective courses in fuel processes, on project management of a gas storage facility, and my thesis on producing fuel out of biomass provided an entry point into the energy business, as well as an interest in the energy business beyond fossile fuels. But I also took electives in non-technical subjects, environmental law (which was the engineer's version of administrative law) and industrial management to keep a wide angle.

Another good thing that happened towards the end of my studies was an opportunity that came my way in the field of Project Management. A regional utility company had applied some creative thought on how to make their project execution better, and apply PM methods more effectively. They came up with a scheme:

• Take some students (abundant in that town, generally cheap, but not uneducated) and teach them project management methods and how to use MS Project.
• Then lend them out to project teams in-house as Project Assistants, meaning they could do menial- and administrative work, inject their methods knowledge and provide pairs of fresh eyes on the project.

I jumped on that, got selected and trained and spent some months working in a nuclear power plant, programming an Excel-base time sheet system feeding into MS Project. I had to learn some VBA, which has come in very handy since on various occasions.

So with my degree in hand, I tried to find ways to apply my skills and knowledge while achieving the following:

• Be useful to humanity by working in an essential (and well paid) field
• Get to see the world and work in a diverse and international environment
• Work on big projects

The funny thing was, during the first job interview I had with a chemical company in Germany, after explaining my career ideas , they told me: "We would really like you to work here, but we do not think you want to." In hindsight, this was a really nice thing of them to say.

The other career that did not work was the EPC business, following the family tradition. That whole industry went through a consolidation period at the time, so that one recruiter actually brought up "We ask a lot, but we don't pay much" in their presentation.

Here, serendipity hit. The oilfield services company Schlumberger, which was almost unknown all over Germany, had a gas meter factory in the city my university was in. They had advertised international oilfield internships, which had really peeked my interest, but three years running, applications from me and two friends were unsuccessful. When asking a representative at a career fair, why that was, the answer was: "Those are very limited, but we are REALLY looking for German engineers, if you want a job." And so it began.

On St. Patrick's Day 2001 (not very well known fun fact, he is also the patron saint of Nigeria) I got my assignment letter to start work as a Coiled Tubing Field Engineer Trainee in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. That changed on arrival, when I was rerouted into the Schlumberger Cementing business, which has stuck with me until today. There, I picked up operational experience from deep offshore to swamp to land, as well as experience with integrate project management and first contact with Shell.

Moving back to Germany, I got to use the offshore bit for a number of remote projects, and picked up commercial tendering experience and commoditized land cementing with small customers. I also met my future wife, who covered the MWD/LWD side of the business. Between us, we joke that we can run the entire upstream business.

Then moving to the Netherlands, I picked up on the Shell thread and became one of the Cementing in-house engineers, learning basic drilling engineering (it really pays to sit in the same place as your customers), creating value to customers from technical solutions to their operational problems, and running on- and offshore services, as well as managing a fairly complex contract and commercial relationship.

Following the Shell route, I was transferred to bring the successful collaborative model from the Netherlands to Aberdeen, Scotland, where the relationship with Shell was not quite as good. I learnt to manage a more adversarial relationship as well as wider tendering, and remote deepwater operations, as well as the intricacies of HP/HT- and extended reach drilling, eventually becoming the Cementing Technical Engineer for the UK in general.

A downturn in the UK business prompted the company to send us to Angola, me as the in-house engineer for BP, who was drilling with one string, but three rigs in two deepwater blocks. This was an interesting experience in organizational culture, with Angola taking occupying the fault line between BP's British and American operations, with a healthy dose of Angolan nationalization. With the GSF Explorer being one of BP's rigs, I also learnt about Project Azorian, REALLY interesting, but only marginally career related. And with personal circumstances and business environments at loggerheads, I also learnt, that when it is time to go, it is time to go. After rehashing my personal situation with three consecutive HR managers over five months, and no internal solution forthcoming, I quit for the first time to join my family in Thailand, just in time to witness my second son's birth.

Here a short interlude. Career matters, work matters, income matters. But you should keep in mind that "He worked 12 hours a day" does not make a good epitaph. There are things in life that matter more, and it is important to keep that in perspective. But not every employer will have that same perspective, and difficult business circumstances do not always allow them to take the long view and look at the big picture either. You are the only one, who can make sure that what is important to your life gets the consideration it deserves. And if things need to change, it helps to have a plan B at hand. Funny story there. Later, I had lunch with a colleague and our common boss, talking about the difficult business environment. And my colleague asked out boss: "What do you think? Ernst says you need to have a plan B for your career." Our boss gave him a deep look over the rim of his glasses and very calm said: "As your manager, I can tell you that everything will be fine." And the accelerating: "But as your friend, of course you need a Plan B." As it happened, my colleague left our company before me.

My plan B was taking a break, while acquiring some more academic credentials. I had discovered, that online full-time degrees in the UK were very affordable and could give you a Masters degree within a year full-time, forming an optional way out of Oil & Gas, or a good broadening outlook within the industry, but avoid the MBA path, which I did not foind interesting. So I picked up my interest in legal things and enrolled for an online Oil & Gas Law Masters degree at Robert-Gordon-University in our Scottish hometown Aberdeen. This way, I could spend time with the family, travel with them from Thailand to Germany and back to the UK, where my wife was officially still employed and on maternity leave, and still not leave a gaping hole in my CV. In Angola, I had lived through the Macondo incident vicariously, with the BP Cementing experts in question staying with us for a visit at that very time. This subject matter, together with the oil & gas regulations knowledge acquired and a separate interest in wargaming methods formed the basis for my thesis (which you can find on my profile, if you are interested).

Before I could finish my studies, after returning to Aberdeen, I received a call from Schlumberger's office there, asking when I would come back to work. They had to fill the position of Technical Engineer for Cementing for the North Sea area. I accepted and combined full-time studies with a full-time job for a couple of months. However after approximately a year, contractual quarrels and mission creep on my job description prompted me to start looking for something else, again with a view to get out of the business. And again that did not work. So I started looking for something to get me away from the Cementing business and maybe make use of the legal side I had picked up. But that did not quite work.

Halliburton had set a headhunter on finding a technical lead for something they wanted to innovate on. Realizing that a region encompassing Europe (few jobs distributed over a large number of countries) and Sub-Saharan Africa (few oil & gas hubs generally requiring expat expertise) could rationalize technical expertise by providing remote technical support, sharing resources and not requiring expat staff. This followed a general model of what was called Remote Operations Centers (ROCs), which had had good success in drilling- and fracturing monitoring, but which they had not tried in the Cementing business. I had had bad experiences with this concept, when Schlumberger had tried to do something similar in Aberdeen, but against the advice from the experienced users in a back-to-front manner, which did not make use of the resources and loaded up the user base more than without the "support". So I had at least experience in how not to do it, and the Halliburton Region Manager and Region Tech Managers gave me full liberty to design the workflow and resource as I saw fit. So this bundled my desire to get out of the day-to-day Cementing Service business, and let me write my own job description, an opportunity way too good to pass up. So I changed colors and started building a ROC. This had initially been conceived as a trial with opportunity for a global roll out. Management changes across the organization did not make that part happen, but to this day, the Cementing ROC in Aberdeen is a resource valued internally and externally, and I would count that as a success.

A second interlude here. This whole project was the brainchild of the two managers hiring me into Halliburton to change they way the organization did business, and it took their full support to build up this resource. Today, I would say that the stars were aligned just there and just then to open this opportunity for me. And I jumped on it. And I have seen this play out on a number of occasions. Opportunities open up, and if you are not jumping on it there and then, they are gone and will not come back.So if you see one of these, and they make a lot of sense to you, do not linger and jump. An opportunity does not guarantee success, but at least you can start something.

My career in Halliburton has been pretty straightforward. When my boss was called up to lead the business in the UK and later the whole Region, I stepped into his Technology role. And when his (and then my) boss moved into the Global HQ, he offered me to come along and take my current role in Tech Services. That actually is an example of an opportunity almost missed. I was supposed to fill an advisory role, that the incumbent was not quite ready to retire from. So as an alternative, I was offered the chance to lead the Tech Services team, acquiring lab experience I had not had much of, but also engage as advisor to the business globally and HQ leadership. So again I got to morph what I knew with something I did not, and here I am.

So what is the takeaway here? The way I see it, career is not really a path. It is much more a fabric or a rope. Follow one strand, see what other strands you find on the way and work them together to create an experience for yourself that interests you, fulfills you and provides you with a coherent narrative to keep moving. This process is not linear, and not one-dimensional, but it maintains flexibility without sacrificing coherence. And if one strand ends, you can splice in another.

I hope that this story will help you find your way, even in these times, where things are going a bit rough, and the career might have to take a few twists and turns you had not expected. I wish you all the best!